Competitive Analysis: Links & Keywords
-
I'm noticing that for some key local search terms our company is not ranking in SERPs as I would expect considering it's size relative to the local sites that are ranking. I subscribed to SEOmoz to get a better understanding of what's going on, and haven't figured it out yet.
Our site is higher in almost every metric than the sites we're competing with, but our competition consistently ranks higher in organic results for industry standard keywords. The few metrics we're being outranked in are, "Linking C Blocks" and "Page MozTrust" (we're very close to the leader in MozTrust).
Are these two metrics enough to account for our companies poor SERP performance or do I need to be paying attention to something else?
-
The bulk of your main content needs to be above the fold. This is the same area where your h1 tag should reside. You can certainly see this with many ecommerce stores.
i.e.
"h1"
"content here"
try to link to two inner pages if you can for additional content that cannot be fully explained on this page. Also try to have a 1 or 2 % keyword density in a 200 word paragraph.
You should be set.
*Keep your keywords in your h1 tag and title tag to the left!"
-
Another question that's come up is content placement. Does Google care where on the homepage text content is? In other words if we had a couple paragraphs of text would Google care if that text appeared where you saw it when loading the page or if that text were located down the page where you'd have to scroll to see it?
-
Defiantly agree with the Penguin Algo.
*When you do initially build out your directory links or custom links, try to use randomization on your anchor phrases. You can do search within searchengineland.com and searchenginejournal.com for post on junk anchors and random anchor phrases.
This algo update rocked the seo industry and many of the over optimize links-anchors were diluted in seo value.
-
Hey, if you need other advice or help with analysis; I usually can point you in the right direction. Good luck!
-
That helps a lot! Thanks for your input. I'll definitely be putting your advice into practice.
-
You Heading Tags also know as your h1 and h3 tags are important for on page seo.
Especially the H1 tag. You should probably define a css class for styling because this tag can be big, bulky, and ugly; however, Google uses this as a large signal for what a web-page is about. The title tag is also the other most vital signal and it should match the h1 (I mean the keyword phrase you are targeting).
I emphasize everyday to internal departments where I work about the importance of on-page-seo. In competitive search ninches, these on page scores and organicness (if that is a word) will matter in stable rankings.
Also where you have your h1 should be above the fold (nerd jargon), right under the top nav. The h1 followed by a simple paragraph that has useful content and one or two links to direct users to targeted pages or directories.
Hope this helps.
-
These are some exceptional answers gentlemen! I think our answer may lie in content. After reading these responses and looking at our site I noticed that our homepage doesn't have any text up front and center on the homepage. thinkwebstore.com is the domain. We have some text navigation, an image of our team and a slider...it's not until the user scrolls down the page that we get to some actual text content.
I took a look at the sites that are ranking for the keyword, "website design jackson ms" and each of them has prominent text front and center. There is one site that doesn't have prominent text on their homepage, and they're ranking #1 for, "website design mississippi". What that site has that I have not gotten to yet (I just recently rebuilt our site and haven't finished our technical SEO yet) is titles for their navigation text.
Would you all mind commenting on the importance of text content placement on the page (front and center vs further down the page), and titles for navigation and how these elements relate to ranking well in SERPs.
-
Some good information already from Chad, but to answer your question directly, yes the amount of unique links (c-blocks) as well as the anchor text of those links could have a large impact on ranking positions.
Without knowing more about your site, the competitors and the phrases you want to rank for it is hard to know exactly what the issues could be, but other things to consider:
-
On page SEO - Are your optimised properly for the terms you think you should rank for and how do you compare to the competition?
http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/newAbove and beyond the general checks the tool above will run, do you have 'great' content in place on-page to match the search queries you want to rank for?
-
Penalties and Filters - 2012 was massive for Penguin and Panda, make sure you have not been over-linking or doing anything else Google doesn't like. It could be another reason why you are not doing so well for these terms.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/penguins-pandas-and-panic-at-the-zoo
Good Luck!
-
-
I would suggest using Majestic SEO to look at your website's overall trust for links coming into the website.
They have a great graph that shows the "trust flow" and "citation flow" of your link profile. The closer to the orgin point the better those links are and chances are Google will trust those links voting for your site.
There is also on-page seo too. Make sure you audit each website ranking over you in link profile and on page seo. Things like too many characters in title, meta description, meta keyword matter! On-page-content and or keyword density matter too; you don't want keyword density higher than 3% (if you're using static type of content), this too will be a make or break difference in where you sit in Google's SERP!
Also the delivery of actual content has a lot to do with were you'll sit for certain keyword phrases. The more organic and useful the page to the user; naturally your social signals will increase, organic links will increase and thus stronger more stable ranks for certain phrases keywords.
*In SEO today the best thing you can do is study what your competitors offer in content on the page and beat'em. Syndicating your content to places where people can share you're great content or product (whatever) is really the best way to direct your overall efforts!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
404 errors & old unused pages
I am using shopify and I need to delete some old pages which are coming up as 404 errors (product no longer available!) does anyone know where you go to delete these pages which are no longer needed?
Web Design | | carleyb0 -
Internal linking: Repeating same low level pages from high hierarchy level pages
Hi all, We have 3 editions of our product we are trying to rank better. Some of our features level pages from these editions are repeating in these 3 editions. Exactly like below example: clothes.com/cotton-fabrics/shirts clothes.com/wool-fabrics/shirts clothes.com/polyester-fabrics/shirts "Shirts" pages repeat in "cotton-fabrics", "wool-fabrics" and "polyester-fabrics". We have added rel=canonical to rank "shirts" in rank only one category. I wonder do we need to take any other measures to make sure that these pages don't affect us negatively. Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Do Follow Link In Footer Only: How Do I Do it?
In a past Q&A forum about web design companies adding footer links to the websites they make, I really liked Irving Weisses' solution where he stated: "I think the best solution is a dofollow homepage ONLY footer link. This is the highest PR page, usually the most traffic so good visibility for advertising, you're not creating tons of sitewide links with identical anchor texts, and the owner is only leaking some PR on their homepage." I want to implement this but would like to know the best way to do this. I deal Wordpress 95% of the time. Is there a plugin or CSS code that would allow me to put a Do follow link in the footer but make the link disappear on all the other pages? Thanks in advanced everyone 🙂 Wesley Barras, Houston, TX
Web Design | | Wesley-Barras0 -
Without Keyword Info From Google - How do we re-do a site not knowing what to keep?
Bit of a riddle I am trying to figure out here... I have a client that receives some visits via organic searches (around 700). Most of which are to the homepage. The client isn't actively targeting any keywords yet (on purpose) and the homepage doesn't have much on it. I've been hired to do keyword research and re-develop the site but this is the first site I've done since google really put the hurt on keyword information. My worry is that without knowing what keywords people are using currently to search and find the site, I will be potentially deleting information that is bringing in traffic. Looking at the traffic and other keywords I can view I think the keywords are branded which makes it a bit easier but again, it is a bit worrisome, not so much for this client but for future work. Anyone have any ideas other than looking at webmaster tools and landing pages?
Web Design | | JoshBowers20120 -
How to link to a site without passing ANY linkjuice (other than simply nofollowing)
I have heard that there are other ways of linking to a site, to completely avoid passing any seo value I think it was even in a whiteboard friday video where I saw Rand say something about doing a 307 "temporary" redirect, or something like that? Basically, I want to let my customers compare our prices with ebay, but I don't want to have ebay outrank us (for obvious reasons) Any help?
Web Design | | TylerAbernethy0 -
Sub-pages with more links than homepage - bad?
Hi,
Web Design | | rayvensoft
I am working on merging a number of my niche websites into a larger site (301 redirects, phased in over a few months). My question/concern is whether google will penalize the main site when it sees that the homepage has almost no links to it, and that about 10-15 sub-pages have a lot of links back to it. Does anybody have experience with this kind of scenario? Will it create a problem? Theoretically I could spend a year or so building up links to the new main page - building the brand - before doing the 301's. The smaller pages still bring in clients, but it is getting hard to maintain that many micro sites. Thanks in advance for any help.0 -
Too Many Links Since Mega Menu Implementation
We have an issue with our recently introduced ‘mega-menu’, which has increased our link count on all pages (as it is a global menu across the entire website). Is it acceptable to load our mega-menu drop-down content onto the page via AJAX in order to reduce the number of on-page links, leaving only the department headings as on-page links (in order to keep the user experience the same/similar)? Or is dynamic loading of link content frowned upon by Google? We would still have the ‘AJAX'd’ links available as on-page/crawlable links in the left menu of the department landing pages, by navigating via the department headings. Any help/advice that could be offered is welcomed. Thanks
Web Design | | DVCrawler0 -
Old SEO keyword "articles", are they hurting rankings?
Hello, About two years ago, the company I work for hired an SEO firm to improve organic rankings on our site. The SEO company's primary method for doing this was producing "articles" that are not really articles but keyword stuffed pages with lots of hidden, internal links to other legitimate pages on our site. Examples: http://www.creamright.com/Isi-Chargers-articles.html http://www.creamright.com/How-To-Make-Whipped-Cream-article.html http://www.creamright.com/Cream-Whipper-articles.html Obviously, this strategy wasn't greatly successful and we cancelled our work with the firm. However, we still have all of the "articles" on the site (about 50-60 pages total) and each page is navigable from the html and XML sitemaps. Additionally, the SEO firm we used built a lot of useless links to these pages from BS directory sites which are all still active. The question I have is whether we should remove these "article" pages or should leave them alone? Although I'm sure they aren't helping any of our SEO efforts, could deleting the pages after two years negatively impact our search rankings? Thanks in advance for any help on this, Doug M.
Web Design | | Loganshark1